| Study Guide for Week 2 (continued)
Michel-Guillaume St. Jean de Crèvecouer One of the most enthusiastic celebrants of the emerging American nation, St. Jean de Crèvecouer was a Frenchman who found the experiment in democracy and individualism so appealing that he bought an estate in New York, married and began a family in the lap of his adopted country. He began writing sketches of his experiences in the colonies and later expanded them into full essays entitled "Letters from an American Farmer." He returned to France in 1780 where his published essays received wide acclaim. In his absence, his wife had died, and his children taken in by a family in Boston. His house was burned to the ground in an Indian raid, and he finally settled in Normandy where he lived out the last 21 years of his life. St. Jean de Crèvecouer's treatment of the American experience ranges from idealism to cool, sagacious reporting. His "What is an American?" exemplifies this range. Following the paragraph in which he introduces the now famous "melting pot" metaphor to characterize this "new race of men," he idealizes the frontier farming experience in which "wives and children . . . now fat and frolicsome, gladly help their father to clear those fields whence exuberant crops are to arise to feed and clothe them all." Within a page, however, he turns his critical attention to "our back settlers," describing in clinical, stark realism their "half mongrel breed, half civilized, half savage" children who "live in sloth and inactivity." St. Jean de Crèvecouer's wide-angled
vision of the American experience and his clear writing did much to secure
favorable attention to the upstart experiment in democracy, that would,
in time, unhinge the political influence and once powerful roles of the
various aristocracies across Europe.
Study Questions 1) Summarize in a paragraph the chief attributes of St. Jean de Crèvecouer's new American. 2) What in his essay, "What is an American?" would suggest St. Jean de Crèvecouer's aristocratic leanings or an undercurrent of classism? 3) Idealization is the process of reducing a subject to a set of only highly valued distinctive features. What other examples of idealism can you find in "What is an American?" Return
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